Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter. Ludwig von Mises

Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson

I was once asked by an advocate of citizen disarmament what I thought of 'gun control,' ... as I framed my answer, he added, 'Give me the short answer.'
'Okay,' I answered, 'if you try to take our firearms we will kill you.'
Mike Vanderboegh

Monday, July 01, 2013

Murray Rothbard's "For a New Liberty" revisited

Happy July. Despite my promise to NV, I failed to post anything celebrating UC's ninth anniversary. I do plan to get together a Fourth of July post on American Independence Day. In the meantime, in the course of working on a research paper I happened across the Amazon.com reviews of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty. Most of the reviews are positive, and the ones I read seemed entirely uncritical. The few negative reviews were trashed in the comments section, and frankly weren't that great, although I think the commenters tended to be rather unfair. So what the heck, I posted my own review of Rothbard's book, awarding it a measly two stars. The review, posted below with a bit of editing, explains. Enjoy.
*****

It's difficult to figure how many stars to award this book, because it entails both the very good and the very bad, and then descends into the very ugly.

The good first: Rothbard's book is a classic of libertarian thought, and anyone with a serious interest in libertarian ideas should read this at some point. It is well- written in that it is quite readable, very interesting, and in many respects nicely argued. Whether you agree with him or not, Rothbard has very interesting perspectives on many issues and lays out what is a mostly self-consistent system of addressing problems using the free market instead of government. In short, he identifies serious problems with government action in various spheres, and proposes alternative free market/nonstate solutions. His defense of individual liberty is important reading. He takes on supposedly difficult cases for the market, such as provision of education, roads, and police and judicial services. Some of these are quite thought-provoking, and whether one finds them convincing or not, they are certainly worth reading. Rothbard essentially concludes that a stateless society based on anarcho-capitalism would be far superior to any state. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in understanding the anarcho-capitalism variant of libertarianism.

The bad: In some places Rothbard's analysis is quite shallow, so much so as to almost make him seem silly. He basically ignores the public goods problem in economics, essentially by denying it exists. This is a bad error, since the primary argument for having government at all is based on this. His analysis is entirely inadequate and unconvincing. Similarly, in his discussion of private police and defensive agencies (his solution to replace the state) he responds to the challenge that such agencies would fight among themselves like mafias -- his response is to simply assert that they would find it too costly to fight. Well, that's a nonsensical response. One might as easily make the same argument about states to "prove" that wars never occur. If a profit-maximizing private defensive agency in stateless society decided it could make more by killing off its competitors and stealing their assets, why wouldn't it? It's a legitimate and obvious question, and Rothbard has no answer at all.

It gets worse...the ugly: By the time he gets to foreign policy, Rothbard has been on such a jihad against the state, and the U.S. government in particular, that he goes berserk and accuses the United States of being the bad guys in the (then ongoing) Cold War. In the First Edition (1973) he went so far as to attribute to Stalin a libertarian foreign policy, alleging the USSR practiced non-interventionism. When it was pointed out to him that the USSR invaded Finland, Rothbard added to his Second Edition a defense of Stalin's attack, arguing that Stalin only wanted to reclaim traditionally Russian Karelia and liberate all the Russians supposedly living there. All of that is a-historical nonsense and Rothbard simply invented it. The Soviets planned to capture all of Finland and had even assembled a new Marxist government they hoped to install in Helsinki. The areas Stalin invaded are not "traditionally Russian." But even if Rothbard's interpretation were true, how can Rothbard justify on libertarian grounds the bloodiest dictatorship in history attacking a free country in an effort to get "its" land and people back? It makes no sense, but Rothbard's only concern is to defend his indefensible claim that the United States surpasses the rest of the world in doing evil. Unfortunately for Rothbard, long before the First Edition came out there was ample evidence that the Stalin and other Soviet leaders engaged in interventionism all around the world, often quite bloodily (Katyn Forest anyone?) Rothbard's "libertarian" defense of Stalin is despicable and intellectually dishonest -- and that's the real problem with this book. Rothbard pretends that he's doing careful analysis and finds the state wanting while showing that his own anarcho-capitalist system shines. But in fact, no argument is so bad, no intellectual sleight-of-hand too dishonest, if it will get Rothbard to his pre-chosen conclusion.

I appreciate Rothbard's fierce devotion to individual liberty in this book and there are many interesting ideas, but his willingness to make bad and even dishonest arguments in its defense lead me to conclude two stars. Frederic Bastiat argued "The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended," so by that standard I'm letting Rothbard off easy.

*****
BTW, I'm currently ranked 1,097,590 among Amazon reviewers. If you click on my review and say you found it helpful, you may help me break into the top 1 million bracket. Fame and fortune await!

Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately I can't read your piece because I don't do Facebook. I have seen one or two other people expose Rothbard on this issue in blog comments somewhere maybe Nolan's libertarian site) -- perhaps it was you?